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Feature Articles - Women and WWI - Women in the Workforce: Temporary Men

One immediate result of the war's outbreak was the rise in female unemployment,
especially among the servants, whose jobs were lost to the middle-classes' wish
to economise.

However, it was soon seen that the only option to replace the
volunteers gone to the front was employing women in the jobs they had left
behind; conscription only made this need even more urgent as had the Munitions
of Work Act 1915 by which munitions factories had fallen under the sole control
of the Government.

As the main historian of women's work, Gail Braybon,
claims, for many women the war was "a genuinely liberating experience" (link)
that made them feel useful as citizens but that also gave them the freedom and
the wages only men had enjoyed so far. Approximately 1,600,000 women joined the
workforce between 1914 and 1918 in Government departments, public transport, the
post office, as clerks in business, as land workers and in factories, especially
in the dangerous munitions factories, which were employing 950,000 women by
Armistice Day (as compared to 700,000 in Germany).

Women's job mobility also
increased enormously, with a large number of women abandoning service for
factory work never to return to it to the chagrin of the middle-class women that
were left without home help in many cases.

In general, women did very well, surprising men with their ability to undertake
heavy work and with their efficiency. By the middle of the war they were already
regarded as a force to be proud of, part of the glory of Britain. However, their
entrance into the workforce was initially greeted with hostility for the usual
sexist reasons and also because male workers worried that women's willingness to
work for lower wages would put them out of work.

The Government, besides,
combined a welfare policy offering subsidies to families with husbands at the
front with increasing female work in order to conscript skilled workers formerly
regarded as indispensable to the war effort. To make up for the loss in the
skilled workforce the entry of women in factories was often facilitated by
'dilution', that is to say, the breaking down of complex tasks into simpler
activities that non-skilled women workers could easily carry out.

The women employed in munitions factories, popularly known as munitionettes have
became the most visible face of the woman worker in WWI, though doubt
remains as to whether their motivation was patriotic or simply economic. The
factories they manned had been seized by
Lloyd George's Government and he also
caused suspension of all trade union activities in them.

Munitionettes produced 80%
of the weapons and shells used by the British Army and daily risked their lives
working with poisonous substances without adequate protective clothing or the
required safety measures. Although this can be seen as a gauge of their will to
sacrifice everything for Britain it should be read, rather, as part of their
treatment as cheap, easily replaceable labour.

The public recognition and
sympathy that the 'canaries' (thus nicknamed for the yellow tinge that skin
exposed to sulphur acquired) received could not make up for their work
conditions. Leading trade-unionist Mary MacArthur, Secretary since 1903 of the
Women's Trade Union League, led an energetic campaign to demand they were paid
as much as the men employed in the same industry - the women only got half the
men's wages - but by the end of the war the proportion was roughly still the
same.

The Government also invited women to join the ranks of the Women's Land
Army, an organisation that offered cheap female labour to farmers not always
keen to employ women. The 260,000 volunteers that made up the WLA were given
little more than a uniform and orders to work hard as the fuel restrictions made
a return to manual agricultural labour unavoidable; unless, that is, the
Government used this as an excuse, counting on these women's cheerful acceptance
of any hardship to make working the land as cheap as possible.

It's hard to say whether women workers understood from the beginning that their
employment could only be temporary but so it was. The same situation was
repeated in the main belligerent countries: women were dismissed back home to
make room for the returning veterans, only in some cases their efforts were thanked
with the right to vote. There are, besides, disagreements among historians,
depending on whether they call themselves feminist or not, as to how much
resentment this return home generated.

We must assume single women in families
with no male casualties must have been more resentful than married women whose
families had faced important loses or whose husbands had returned safely from
the front. It's important to remember at any rate, as Joanna Bourke does, that
for women "Even more traumatic [than losing jobs] was the painful process of
readjusting to the return of loved ones from the battlefields. Hundred of
thousands of men returned from the war injured in some way. Women bore a large
part of the burden of caring for these men. Even worse, women lost their
fathers, husbands, lovers, brothers, and sons. For these women, life would never
be the same." Nor would
it be for the men; they, however, needn't fight for their right to have a
job.

There is, therefore, a generalised consensus among historians that women were
not truly emancipated by the Great War in any country involved in it. Ute Daniel
explains in The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World
War that this was indeed the case for German women, noting that WWI's most
important outcome was shifting German factory women workers from one sector to
another. She is quite critical that safety standards in factories fell back to
19th century standards and that women only acquired superficial skills as they
were expected to be soon demobilised.

In Germany pronatalist policies together
with an expanding welfare state focused on the family seem to have overruled the
more pragmatic British and French approaches to using women in the war effort.
Interestingly, Daniel points out that the German Government did not foresee how
the scarcity of consumer goods - especially food - and the pressure this put on
women would eventually create pockets of discontent that would undermine the
women's support for the war effort.

In Britain the gains were also modest, clashing not only with the upper and
middle-class women's desire to conquer a firm foothold in the professions but
also with working women's trade unionism. Leaders like Margaret Bonfield saw
with dismay that the 1915 Board of Trade call for women to register at the
Labour Exchange would work against the efforts of trade unions, saturating the
job market with women happy to work for the lowest wages. She and Mary MacArthur
tried to redress the situation asking that all women employed for war service
became trade union members and that they got the same wages as men. They failed
in both accounts.

As Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield observe in
Out of the
Cage: Women's Experiences in Two World Wars, (1987: 69), only women welders,
tutored by the Women's Service Bureau, managed to form during the war a
compact, skilled, unionised group though this needn't mean they did stay in
their jobs. Joanna Burke adds that while by 1918 around 1,000,000 women were
members of female trade unions, their wages did not significantly grow (Women
and Employment on the Home Front During World War One,
BBC)
because of dilution: "By 1931, a working woman's weekly wage had returned to the
pre-war situation of being half the male rate in more industries."